Sci Fi SoundTrack

New Scientist has an interesting article about novel methods for interstellar travel, which includes links to recent scientific articles:

In August, physicist Jia Liu at New York University outlined his design for a spacecraft powered by dark matter (arxiv.org/abs/0908.1429v1). Soon afterward, mathematicians Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland at Kansas State University in Manhattan proposed plans for a craft powered by an artificial black hole (arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803).

Liu claims to have his inspiration come from Bussard and the interstellar ramjet concept, but maybe he just read my novel Spider Star that has a very similar idea, at least in the sense that dark matter is used as fuel.  My idea is very direct, with a “beater” that pushes around WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles).  Liu’s idea is based on a theory involving how dark matter may annihilate to release energy.

I’m not the first to use black holes to drive space ships (as I did in Star Dragon using a variation on an idea that first appeared in a physics paper in the 1950s), not by a longshot, but it is always welcome to see serious efforts to develop new ideas about how to do this thing.

Also recently, Charlie Stross has made a very thoughtful post getting a lot of attention about how interstellar travel is really hard and doesn’t even fit into the spaceship paradigm, barring some series developments in physics.  Well, a dark matter drive could potentially be such a development.